Hey Friends,
Everyone I speak to at the moment is telling me how tired they feel. I get it. I feel totally spent myself. My body is communicating a deep need to go inwards and restore over the next weeks before facing 2024. I have given 2023 as much as I can so I have plans to relax, get away from screens and focus on restoring myself over the coming weeks. I would encourage you all to do the same.
In light of that, I pulled this essay from the archives. I wrote it in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic when I was feeling burnt out. It was a reminder to me that my body always knows best and if I am tired, I should rest. Hope you enjoy it and it gives you permission to also rest over the holiday period.
Fiona x.
Choosing Yin over Yang
On a blustery Sunday afternoon towards the end of June I sat down to write. Longing to retreat to the soft creative space within. To access deeper parts of myself. On that day, the paper in front of me remained blank. Each route I tried, a dead-end. I couldn’t connect to my inner self.
A dry well hadn’t happened since last September, just after I finished my dissertation. This time I had no such excuse. No paper to deliver, no writing deadline I had to make. No one else to blame. I was simply doing too much. Doing too much is my Achilles heel, my weakness in life and my greatest challenge.
People assume I am quite ‘zen’. I get called that regularly. A considered enough assumption given I speak and write about, amongst other things, spirituality and contemplation. Regrettably, primarily for myself, nothing could be further from the truth. In the opposing forces of Yin and Yang, I more naturally occupy the yang state of ‘action’ and ‘doing’. This is, perhaps, why I crave my inner yin state so much. It does not come as easily to me. But it is where I feel most at home. The place I feel really like myself. It is also the source of my creativity.
Fighting with Myself
These two parts of myself are often in conflict. The yang-like extrovert loves people, adventure, change and spontaneity. The yin-like inner contemplative needs care, stillness, quiet and time. I have come to accept them both. To see the role each plays in my life and work. How they complement each other. In a textbook or a soundbite, someone would mention the need for balance. But life is not a textbook and I don’t really do balance. It sounds a bit too…. well…balanced. Lacking in spontaneity. Instead, I have found my own way of providing what each part of me needs without silencing the other. An imperfect way that works….most of the time. Imperfect, however, in that I often have to start again. And this summer was once such time….
I experienced this summer like my inner centre of gravity was a moving pendulum, finding it difficult to achieve consistent equilibrium. My nervous system was more agitated than normal. For all of us, this has been a turbo-charged year for spiritual and personal growth. I barely recognise who I was in January. Against this backdrop, I have been forced to work harder than normal to get into that embodied centred state that allows my writing to come naturally. With an external environment that is changing daily, it has been easy to take on more things, do more as a means of distraction, a coping mechanism. Because to allow yourself to be embodied is to feel deeply. And feeling everything this year has just been, at times, a little too hard.
Creativity is a Felt Experience in My Life
For me, creativity is not a cognitive process, it is rooted in my body. I ‘feel’ my creativity. My heart tells me how to express myself. Writing often makes me emotional. I feel a sensation when something I write is meaningful. Almost like a release that an idea incubating inside me has been expressed. Sometimes when I am speaking at an event, I am even surprised by what I voice, like I didn’t realise it was there before I said it. Creativity and expression are felt experiences for me. To access them, I need to be grounded in my body. Connected to myself.
We experience life through our bodies. Although we may take in knowledge cognitively, wisdom comes from the body. That the body is the source of our collective wisdom has a long history. The divine feminine archetype Sophia (translated from Greek as ‘wisdom’) was represented by the body. The acclaimed mythologist Joseph Campbell₁ described that throughout history, divine feminine archetypes have been linked to the body as both the holder of wisdom and a vehicle for transformation. A growing body of contemporary research supports the idea of somatic wisdom such as heart and gut intelligence and the power of intuition.
To hear what our bodies are saying requires us to embrace periods of quiet and stillness. In my life, the less I do, the more I create. Creativity needs nurture, incubation time, inspiration from the world around us. If I listen to my body and keep it nurtured with food, exercise, rest, love, it sends sparks of inspiration to me as I am out for my run. Tells me the words I have been searching for while I am meditating. Or helps me find the idea for my next speaking appearance when I am hiking up a mountain. If I remember to look after myself, stay embodied, there is no effort involved, the creative inspiration just arrives.
More than my work, being creative enables me to ‘feel’ my way through life. To make better decisions. To help me understand who I am. Poems come from me when something doesn’t make sense. A social media post may resonate with others but the first person who benefits is me. What I am writing about may reflect larger themes in the world but there is always a personal element, an intersection of how it turns up in my life. Without my creativity, it is me who is lost.
Finding Wisdom in Stillness
Creative recovery is a process. You don’t wake up the next day in a more embodied state. Your nervous system has become frantic. Accustomed to doing too much. It takes time to regulate properly again. I had an insight during this time. I wasn’t just resting, I was integrating. Giving my nervous system a chance to catch up with everything that had happened in 2020. It dawned on me that my sleep had been disturbed since March. I usually refer to my sleep as my superpower. I sleep eight hours unbroken most nights. This year, I have regularly woken up with a fright in the middle of the night. On reflection, I see my nervous system was trying to get my attention. To tell me, that although my rational mind was adjusting quickly to this new world and new reality, my body didn’t feel safe. That a global pandemic is a shock and we should treat it like one rather than simply encouraging each other to be ‘resilient’. To be physically separated from the people we care about is not natural for such social beings. That everything already wrong with society, all the pain, the inequality, the toxicity, is now more evident and upsetting. The wisdom of my body was asking me to pause and adjust to this new reality. That to express myself truthfully, I needed time to integrate the growth and change that had been forced on me this year.
It took weeks of doing as little as possible when I could, reducing unnecessary consumption of information (something increasingly difficult in 2020), spending time in nature and practices like yin yoga to open my body up to me again. To make it feel safe. Finally, one night during a yoga class I felt like myself again. Home. All parts of myself integrated. Whole. My body and nervous system had integrated this new story. All at once, I was both sleeping through the night and writing again.
Our world celebrates everything about the yang part of my personality. The more visible parts of who I am are easier to see and reward. I know the real gifts I have to offer, my gifts of expression, come from the deep invisible yin part of myself. The part that benefits from just ‘being’. As I have developed greater self-awareness, I rest more, and the instances of creative drain are less frequent. More than anything I have learnt to trust how I feel. If I listen to my body, it directs me to what feels most natural in that day; rest, adventure, work, create. In today’s culture, we are told to only operate in our heads. Our head doesn’t understand the natural flow of life the way our body does. If we only listen to our head and not our heart and body, we are never whole. The modern narrative claiming the superiority of the intellect is a story which keeps us busy and small. Away from the deep wisdom of who we really are and what we are truly capable of.
During the summer months, while out for my run, almost daily I saw a heron motionless looking into the still water of the canal. When I was running back the other direction, the heron was still there. She became my inspiration, reminding me to be still. To have patience and trust. That the words would surface when the well had filled.
References:
₁Campbell, J. (2013). Goddesses: Mysteries of the feminine divine. Novato,CA: New World Library